By Mark S. Weiner
A revealing examine the function kin-based societies have performed all through heritage and round the world
A energetic, wide-ranging meditation on human improvement that gives excellent classes for the way forward for glossy individualism, The Rule of the Clan examines the constitutional ideas and cultural associations of kin-based societies, from medieval Iceland to fashionable Pakistan.
Mark S. Weiner, a professional in constitutional legislations and criminal background, exhibits us that actual person freedom is determined by the lifestyles of a powerful nation devoted to the general public curiosity. within the absence of a fit nation, he explains, people obviously are likely to create felony buildings situated now not on participants yet relatively on teams. the trendy liberal country makes individualism attainable via retaining this strong force in check—and we ignore the carrying on with danger to liberal values and associations at our peril. whilst, for contemporary individualism to outlive, liberals should also recognize the profound social and mental merits the rule of thumb of the extended family presents and realize the loss humanity sustains in its transition to modernity.
Masterfully argued and jam-packed with wealthy old aspect, Weiner’s research speaks either to trendy liberal societies and to constructing countries riven by way of “clannism,” together with Muslim societies within the wake of the Arab Spring.
Read or Download The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom PDF
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Extra info for The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom
Sample text
Augustine, The City of God (New York: Penguin, 1984): bk. XIX, ch. 15 and Ernest Fortin, “St. Augustine,” in The History of Political Philosophy, Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): p. 183. The Attack on the Catholic Natural Law 27 The unifying thread in Filmer’s account of creation, the guiding principle that combines the genetic and existential dynamics in his argument, is the formulation of an ontology of obedience. This position rested on the premise that all human beings are defined and constrained by the source of their being, whether by God and Adam as the source of all or by the particular fathers of families as the source of each.
53–4. Bellarmine, De Laicis, p. 3, 11, pp. 364–5, 370 (cf. Aristotle Politics, I:2). For a good discussion of the larger polemical aim of the Jesuit scholastics to refute primarily the Lutheran teaching, but also Erasmian humanism and Machiavelllianism, see Skinner, Foundations, pp. 137–46. Bellarmine, De Laicis, pp. 26, 33. Though there is some ground for Somerville’s claim that the late scholastics were “far more radically constitutionalist than is usually supposed,” this suggestion runs the risk of exaggerating the extent of their populism (J.
Francis Oakley, “Christian Obedience and Authority, 1520–1550,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): p. 171. 32 The Divine Right Challenge to Natural Liberty The patriarchalist and Adamite arguments popularized by Filmer had their precursors in the theological and constitutional controversies of earlyseventeenth-century England. The Adamite interpretation of Genesis, which would assume such importance for Filmer, first appeared in England in authoritative circles in the Convocation of 1606 under the leadership of Bishop John Overall.